The NCAA's war on student-athletes ends now: time to unionize, eat and win

Northwestern football's vote is a landmark for an $11bn industry that can no longer trade on the kind of education that can longer be called 'free'

Northwestern players are getting bullied across campus ahead of Friday's secret ballot, even though almost everyone agrees about problems across the landscape of the NCAA's payola model. Photograph: US Army / Flickr via Creative Commons

From the NCAA's point of view, Napier's timing could not have been worse. Here was a 22-year-old black kid, speaking of the hunger games buried within college athletics, from the depths of the Dallas Cowboys stadium, where he had just conquered the Final Four in front of 22m people. And all this in the span of the same month when a judge had – gasp! – let another group of used-up jocks decide for themselves whether they want to unionize.

Embarrassed into action, NCAA president Mark Emmert announced new rules just a week after the championship game, allowing so-called "student-athletes" to eat unlimited food – beyond their scholarship meal plans – rather than have to make do with the sometimes skimpy provisions on campus, at least compared to the beefy $11bn a year in revenue athletes rake in for US college athletics every year.

If, as Comedy Central's Jon Stewart recently joked, the NCAA were a cash-strapped startup, its new food plan might seem like a charitable improvement on what Emmert himself calls a "stupid rule". But the canned response reminds you more of the behavior of multi-billion dollar corporations like McDonald's and Wal-mart, ridiculed for organizing food drives for their own hungry employees or helping them apply for food stamps instead of offering the dignity of a living wage.

These exploited workers have been fighting back against their employers' hypocrisy and greed through the Our Walmart and Fightfor15 campaigns. Now student-athletes have been afforded an historic opportunity to fight back against the NCAA's seemingly unending greed in the face of their gruelingly hard work. (They have to study, too, you know.) And if the jocks care about their own futures – indeed, about the future of college sports, and living wages – they should take a chance.

Today, football players at Northwestern University will vote on whether to form a union. We likely won't know the results for months – there's a lengthy appeals process – but the vote was made possible by a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling last month that found that athletes were technically employees of the school, and therefore have the right to collectively bargain for better terms and conditions.

Needless to say, the NCAA is horrified at the prospect of athletes empowering themselves, and the Wildcats are getting bullied across campus ahead of the secret ballot: fellow students, university staff, alumni, coaches and others have forced the players to back down, even though almost everyone is in agreement that there are genuine problems across the landscape of the NCAA's payola model that need to be addressed, now.

One of the most contentious issues to have arisen from the unionization debate is whether or not athletes should be entitled to some share of the billions in revenue they generate for their schools. Administrations and coaches make out like bandits from so-called "amateur" sport; ESPN and Nike make out pretty nicely, too.

The athletes are supposed to make do with a free education – and now some extra food. I don't mean to belittle the value and increasing cost of a university education in this country, but when a student is obliged to devote up to 50 hours a week to playing sports, his ability to pursue a meaningful degree is kind of, uh, compromised.

In his testimony before the NLRB, Kain Colter, the former Northwestern quarterback who is leading the team's union drive, told the board how he had to abandon his pursuit of a degree in medicine and switch to a less demanding major, because his course work clashed with his training schedule. (Northwestern, it should be noted, wasn't even that good during one of the years he started.)

At least Colter is on track to graduate with some qualification, unlike many of his fellow student-athletes. Most NCAA scholarships are issued on a year-to-year basis, meaning that any athlete can have their scholarship revoked if he fails to fulfill either his academic or sporting requirements. On its website, the NCAA makes clear that sporting requirements take priority:

In most cases, coaches decide who receives a scholarship, what it will cover and whether it will be renewed.

So, by the NCAA’s own admission, an athlete who fails to satisfy a coach can lose his scholarship. You might argue that depriving such athletes of the opportunity to complete their "free" education is just the price we pay for living in a competitive landscape, where ESPN rules and a kid's gotta be hungry to win it all. But those scholarships can be gone in an instant, as quickly as a Shabazz Napier three-pointer or his right shin gone bad.

In 2010, two high-performing Division I football players, Joseph Agnew and Patrick Courtney, sued the NCAA when they lost their athletic scholarships due to injuries. An appeals court ruled against the pair in 2012, however, because the NCAA successfully argued that even if the students were unable to graduate due to a lost scholarship, the harm done to them did not fall within a market protected by antitrust law. These student-athletes got an education, alright – just not the one they hoped for and certainly not any kind of education that can anymore be called "free".

The NCAA can score all the legal victories it wants – hell, it might even bully Northwestern's 76 players into submission today in Evanston, Illinois – but it has exposed a major moral failing: a willingness to dispose of athletes who have out-served their usefulness.

Which reminds me again of McDonald's and Wal-mart. These companies are almost obsessed with how disposable their low-paid workers are to them. Like, robot-disposable. Sure, plenty of colleges treat their student-athletes with respect, the kings of campus. But with so few legal and labor protections, the kings remain as vulnerable as the guys on the burger line, until they double down on those meal plans and organize.

The impact of today's Northwestern vote, in the depths of some other hungry locker room, will be limited for now: one team, one school. So there's no reason for the anti-union hysterics to think the NCAA is in danger of being overrun by socialists just yet.

But a "yes" vote – after a five-person NLRB panel figures out its review of the Wildcats' case – would start to help everyone from the low-round draft picks to the benchwarmers get their fair shake, to earn a couple thousand bucks for earning their schools a couple million.

Already, thanks to Napier's accidental hunger strike, lawmakers in Connecticut are paving the way for athletes to unionize in that state. If jocks across the country believe they deserve more from the NCAA than an extra helping at dinner, they ought to be voting the Husky way, too.